Book excerpt: Taylah Brown is happy. She is. She has graduated university and she is in love and Sydney is a wonderful city to be in love in – all sunshine and blue water everywhere. It’s 2014 and the future is paved out in front her, a heat shimmer of possibility. Haircuts. Concerts. Holidays. Birthdays. Getting engaged, being engaged, going to brunch to show off the ring. More birthdays, a promotion, finding the right white dress. Getting married, going on her honeymoon, buying a house, having a child, getting a dog, going to the gym, moving house, camping at beach, weekends spent baking in the kitchen. New haircuts, new jobs, more birthdays, more birthdays... Choice-laden, picturesque, this is the good life. Isn’t it? Into the Sea is a novel about ‘the Australian way of life’, grounded in ethnographic research, and crafted to engage readers in sociological imagination. A glocal frame sees contemporary cultural tensions play out through the panoramic dimensions of relationships and life events. Designed with layers and levels of reading, this novel will appeal to contemporary fiction readers and makes a lively addition to undergraduate and graduate curriculum across sociology, cultural studies, gender studies, arts-based research, and contemporary literature.